Five Tips for Amazon Sellers Looking for a Quick Boost in Sales

Seeing a lull in sales or a sudden drop in rankings? Keeping your place in Amazon’s competitive market can be hard. If you’ve been resting on past laurels and have found yourself at a standstill lately, you might need a quick boost to get yourself back to steady ground, before you do a thorough overhaul of your campaigns and listings.

A drop in sales might seem like a stunner if you’ve been coasting along for awhile without any glitches. But, before you start blaming yourself or thinking about shutting shop, take a look around you. There are hundreds of sellers out there waiting to grab a piece of your customer base, and they’re all equally hungry, and some of them not beyond stealing listings.

For sellers about to press the panic button, here are some quick ways to boost sales:

1. Do a deep dive of customer reviews and questions and see what went wrong

Is there a bad review you haven’t noticed, that’s sending customers away from your page? If there is, make a considered response that invites buyers to take a closer look at the product features and benefits. If there’s a question that’s essential to making a buy, try and answer it in the product description. Remember, customers read reviews. There are many similar sellers out there, and in online buying, one of the best ways to get to know a product is to see what someone else has to say about it. Very often, customer issues can be addressed by a seller that’s willing to engage and offer a benefit, a solved problem or a replacement, if needed. Amazon keeps track of your order defect rate, late shipping rate and customer response rate. Make sure you’ve got these covered to put yourself back up in searches.

2. Expand your market

If you’ve been limiting your market to the country you’re living in, try and take a trip abroad. Your product might well be useful or attractive to buyers in the Americas, Europe or South-East Asia. You might also find that there are markets where your product is more rare, or where the competition is far from developed. You might be facing a bit of market inertia in your home country, and this might be an excellent opportunity for growth and expansion.

3. Pull in an influencer

Influencer marketing might seem like a newfangled invention to a seller who’s been doing well in the market for awhile. But if you’re seeing a drop in sales in the recent past, it might be worth trying. Probably the most useful thing about influencer marketing is that they tackle the morass that is social media marketing on your behalf. If you’re struggling to keep up with the changing times, especially on Instagram, and social media seems like a very twitchy butterfly to you, then hand over the job to an influencer. They haven’t got much else to do besides stay abreast with the ever-changing world of social media and they’ll do the job of keeping up and pulling in the crowds on your behalf.

4. Lightning Deals and discounts

This is a tried and tested way to bring in a sudden boost in sales. It definitely isn’t a long-term solution, but it does give you time to figure out what went wrong and do a thorough analysis of your inventory. Offering discounts might also help you get rid of stock that’s been lying around for awhile, and help you manage your inventory better. You can also set up a customer engagement campaign on Sellers’ Central, and this can help you gain some insight into customer behaviour. 

5. Do a full inventory scan and overhaul

Amazon’s rules are in a constant state of flux, and if you haven’t been keeping up with changes in regulations or in performance rankings lately, you’re definitely at risk of slipping up in sales. Essential questions:

• Are my product titles optimised?
• Is my keyword placement correct?
• Are images following Amazon’s guidelines?
• Are descriptions and features optimised for customer experience?

If you have a long list of ASINs to run through, try NittyGritti’s AI-enabled platform that offers customers a detailed analysis of product pages, and instructions on what to change and how. NittyGritti’s 185-parameter ranking system gives you a clear picture of where you’re going wrong with your product pages, and simplifies the task of auditing by letting technology take over. 

Once you’ve got a thorough analysis of your product pages, you can make necessary changes and bring yourself back on track. It’s easy to fall off the rails in a growing, changing and expanding market. Drops in sales and rankings can happen to anyone – there is no invulnerable brand or seller, so keep your spirits up and explore ways to increase sales and expand your customer base.